An assessment of the potential for solar PV electricity generation from rooftops in Northern Ireland: English

This research was commissioned by the Department for the Economy NI to undertake;
(i)an assessment of roof top PV potential generation across all suitable* building types within NI applying to 1,414,135 buildings with a total rooftop area of 168,646,423m2. The research outputs provide estimates for generating potential for PV on the following building types, Residential, Commercial, Industrial and Residential General (Garages), Non Residential General Buildings together with All Other Building types which includes uses such as Education and Health buildings etc.

•Note suitable buildings are those extracted from the Fusion Data Building Polygons of area 10m2 plus
(i)an assessment of PV potential to be at varying spatial geographies, such as PV generation potential estimates for residential property typologies and commercial classifications at Local Government District (LGD) (Councils), and Census statistical output geographies such as Super Output Areas (SOA), Small Areas (SA) and Data Zones (DZ) and

Note, there are 3,780 Data Zones (DZ2021) across Northern Ireland, which nest within the 850 Super Data Zones (SDZ2021). These in turn nest within the 80 District Electoral Areas (DEA2014) and 11 Local Government Districts (LGD2014).

(ii)assessing the potential impact of battery storage within the residential sector. Energy storage improves the efficiencies of PV generated electricity usage within residential households and limits the extent to which electricity is exported to the network, as the network was not designed to accommodate distributed energy generation, such as domestic PV.
(iii)This project also investigates the deployment of behind-the-meter batteries operating to maximise the renewable energy consumption rate of PV generated electricity from domestic roofs as they can increase financial benefits to homeowners and help further reduce carbon emissions. The benefits of domestic batteries can be expanded to the electricity network, where they can provide optimal and location-specific services (e.g. peak saving), increase the penetration of intermittent renewable sources (e.g. use of curtailed wind energy), and defer costly network upgrades. Additional tasks also undertaken in the research include,

•the provision of a tool/dashboard permitting further scenario and assumption testing and
•a presentation delivered to the Department and its interested partners.